Occasionally, startups will ask me for advice. That's a shame, because I am a terrible person to ask for advice. The conversation usually goes something like this: We'd love to get your expert advice on our thing. I probably don't use your thing. Even if I tried your thing out and I gave you ...

Midwifery professor Denis Walsh argues that labor pain is good for women: In an article for Evidence Based Midwifery, published by the Royal College of Midwives, Dr Walsh said the NHS was too quick to give in to requests for pain-killing injections. He said: ‘A large number of women want to avo...

It seems to me that taxing those things that increase _overall, long term_ unhappiness. People will tend to maximise their instantaneous happiness perfectly well by themselves, but are notoriously bad at medium/long term thinking.

Last week I described how Robert Frank wants to discourage "conspicuous consumption" via big houses, cars, and barbecues, because he thinks they cause large positional (i.e., relative status) harms on others. After describing our best data on positionality, I asked if Frank would endorse its im...